Amos Quito:Throughout history, humans do seem to have had an inexplicable tendency to want to believe and put their faith in a "higher power" of some sort. These days we seem to be trending away from the traditional "sky-god" worship and leaning more toward the (often equally irrational) worship of State, "science" and academia.

Leaving aside several implicit assumptions of the loaded term "worship", I think it's tied to differential attitudes on authority, on what "authority" is, and (at a really fundamental abstract level) how lookup tables can be faster than algorithms in some scenarios (the difficulty being in the non-algorithmic step of picking which lookup table to use).

Amos Quito:But this creature is rare and elusive - as "science" is highly succeptible to corruption for the sake of ego, profit and political gain, and is constantly manipulated by those we entrust - the bought-and-sold "Scientific Priest Class" to hoodwink and manipulate the befuddled rabble to serve nefarious agendas.

Seeming less so than most other forms of human endeavor, however.

Amos Quito:The placebo outperformed BOTH the SSRI's and the new drugs.The google-fu fails at the moment, so this will have to suffice.

...which includes a link to the technical article -- (doi:10.1001/jama.2009.1943) -- which includes in the abstract (emphasis added) "The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial."

The problem of isn't so much in the science, as in the second-hand reports of the science (EG: the link you used) by popular press media -- which is far more "highly susceptible to corruption for the sake of ego, profit and political gain, and constantly manipulated".

Amos Quito:Where do you think most people get their information on "science"? Do you think John and Jane Doe read peer-reviewed articles and studies? Or do they rely on articles such as the one to which I linked (in a rush - unable to locate the one I had in mind)?

Yes, the world is too complex and too sophisticated for everyone to really understand everything, and we must put our trust in the technocrats who study these fields (no, NOT belief. Trust. There is a difference). That doesn't mean the technocrats can lie and swindle their way to personal power and profit because their discoveries are still reliant on real world application, and if they lie, then those applications won't work. They'll be outed as frauds, and they quite frequently are.